GREATEST
single news event of 1938 took place on September 29,
when four statesmen met at the Fuhrerhaus, in Munich, to
redraw the map of Europe.

The three visiting statesmen at that historic
conference were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
of Great Britain, Premier Edouard Daladier of
France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy.
But by all odds the dominating figure at Munich was the
German host, Adolf Hitler.

Fuhrer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of
the German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the
Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich
the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign
policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had
torn the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed
Germany to the teeth--or as close to the tooth as he was
able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a
horrified and apparently impotent world.

All these events were shocking to nations which had
defeated Germany on the battlefield only 20 years
before, but nothing so terrified the world as the
ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during
late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over
Czechoslovakia. When without loss of blood he reduced
Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state, forced a
drastic revision of Europe's defensive alliances, and
won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe by getting
a "hands-off" promise from powerful Britain (and later
France), Adolf Hitler without doubt became 1938's Man of
the Year.

Most other world figures of 1938 faded in importance
as the year drew to a close. Prime Minister
Chamberlain's "peace with honor" seemed more than ever
to have achieved neither. An increasing number of
Britons ridiculed his appease-the-dictators policy,
believed that nothing save abject surrender could
satisfy the dictators' ambitions.

Among many Frenchmen there rose a feeling that
Premier Daladier, by a few strokes of the pen at Munich,
had turned France into a second-rate power. Aping
Mussolini in his gestures and copying triumphant Hitler's
shouting complex, the once liberal Daladier at year's
end was reduced to using parliamentary tricks to keep
his job.

During 1938 Dictator Mussolini was only a decidedly
junior partner in the firm of Hitler & Mussolini,
Inc. His noisy agitation to get Corsica and Tunis from
France was rated as a weak bluff whose immediate
objectives were no more than cheaper tolls for Italian
ships in the Suez Canal and control of the
Djibouti-Addis Ababa railroad.

Gone from the international scene was Eduard
Benes, for 20 years Europe's "Smartest Little
Statesman." Last President of free Czechoslovakia, he
was now a sick exile from the country he helped found.
Pious Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Man
of 1937, was forced to retreat to a "New" West China,
where he faced the possibility of becoming only a
respectable figurehead in an enveloping Communist
movement. If Francisco Franco had won the Spanish
Civil War after his great spring drive, he might well
have been Man-of-the-Year timber. But victory still
eluded the Generalissimo and war weariness and
disaffection on the Rightist side made his future
precarious.

On the American scene, 1938 was no one man's year.
Certainly it was not Franklin Roosevelt's; his
Purge was beaten and his party lost much of its bulge in
the Congress. Secretary Hull will remember Good
Neighborly 1938 as the year he crowned his trade treaty
efforts with the British agreement, but history will not
specially identify Mr. Hull with 1938. At year's end in
Lima, his plan of Continental Solidarity for the two
Americas had a few of its teeth pulled.

But the figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing
Europe with all the swagger of a conqueror. Not the mere
fact that the Fuhrer brought 10,500,000 more people
(7,000,000 Austrians, 3,500,000 Sudetens) under his
absolute rule made him the Man of 1938. Japan during the
same time added tens of millions of Chinese to her
empire. More significant was the fact Hitler became in
1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic,
freedom-loving world faces today.

His shadow fell far beyond Germany's frontier. Small,
neighboring States (Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia,
Lithuania, The Balkans, Luxembourg, The Netherlands)
feared to offend him. In France Nazi pressure was in
part responsible for some of the post-Munich
anti-democratic decrees. Fascism had intervened openly
in Spain, had fostered a revolt in Brazil, was covertly
aiding revolutionary movements in Rumania, Hungary,
Poland, Lithuania. In Finland a foreign minister had to
resign under Nazi pressure. Throughout eastern Europe
after Munich the trend was toward less freedom, more
dictatorship. In the U.S. alone did democracy feel itself
strong enough at year's end to give Hitler his
come-uppance.

The Fascintern, with Hitler in the driver's seat, with
Mussolini, Franco and the Japanese military cabal riding
behind, emerged in 1938 as an international,
revolutionary movement. Rant as he might against the
machinations of international Communism and
international Jewry, or rave as he would that he was just
a Pan-German trying to get all the Germans back in one
nation, Fuhrer Hitler had himself become the world's No.
1 International Revolutionist--so much so that if the
oft-predicted struggle between Fascism and Communism now
takes place it will be only because two revolutionist
dictators, Hitler and Stalin, are too big to let each
other live in the same world.

But Fuhrer Hitler does not regard himself as a
revolutionary; he has become so only by force of
circumstances. Fascism has discovered that freedom--of
press, speech, assembly--is a potential danger to its
own security. In Fascist phraseology democracy is often
coupled with Communism. The Fascist battle against
freedom is often carried forward under the false slogan
of "Down with Communism!" One of the chief German
complaints against democratic Czechoslovakia last summer
was that it was an "outpost of Communism."

A generation ago western civilization had apparently
outgrown the major evils of barbarism except for war
between nations. The Russian Communist Revolution
promoted the evil of class war. Hitler topped it by
another, race war. Fascism and Communism both
resurrected religious war. These multiple forms of
barbarism gave shape in 1938 to an issue over which men
may again, perhaps soon, shed blood: the issue of
civilized liberty v. barbaric authoritarianism.

LESSER men of the year seemed small indeed beside the
Fuhrer. Undoubted Crook of the Year was the late
Frank Donald Coster (ne Musica), with Richard
Whitney, now in Sing Sing Prison, as runner-up.
Sportsman of the Year was Tennist Donald Budge,
champion of the U.S., England, France, Australia.
Aviator of the Year was 33-year-old Howard Robard
Hughes, diffident millionaire, who flew a sober,
precise, foolproof course 14,716 miles round the top of
the world in three days, 19 hours, eight minutes.

Radio's Man of the Year was youthful Orson
Welles who, in his famous The War of the Worlds
broadcast, scared fewer people than Hitler, but more
than had ever been frightened by radio before,
demonstrating that radio can be a tremendous force in
whipping up mass emotion. Playwright of the Year was
Thornton Wilder, previously a precious
litterateur, whose first play on Broadway, Our
Town, was not only ingenious and moving, but a big
hit. To Gabriel Pascal, producer of
Pygmalion, first full- length picture based on the
wordy dramas of George Bernard Shaw, went the
title of Cineman of the Year for having discovered a
rich mine of dramatic material when other famed
producers had given up all hope of ever tapping it. Men
of the Year, outstanding in comprehensive science were
three medical researchers who discovered that nicotinic
acid was a cure for human pellagra: Drs. Tom Douglas
Spies of Cincinnati General Hospital, Marion
Arthur Blankenhorn of the University of Cincinnati,
Clark Niel Cooper of Waterloo, Iowa.

In religion, the two outstanding figures of 1938 were
in sharp contrast save for their opposition to Adolf
Hitler. One of them, Pope Pius XI, 81, spoke with
"bitter sadness" of Italy's anti-Semitic laws, the
harrying of Italian Catholic Action groups, the
reception Mussolini gave Hitler last May, declared
sadly: "We have offered our now old life for the peace
and prosperity of peoples. We offer it anew." By
spending most of the year in a concentration camp,
Protestant Pastor Martin Niemoller gave
courageous witness to his faith.

It was noteworthy that few of these other men of the
year would have been free to achieve their
accomplishments in Nazi Germany. The genius of free
wills has been so stifled by the oppression of
dictatorship that Germany's output of poetry, prose,
music, philosophy,art has been meagre indeed.

The man most responsible for this world tragedy is a
moody, brooding, unprepossessing, 49-year-old
Austrian-born ascetic with a Charlie Chaplin
mustache. The son of an Austrian petty customs official,
Adolf Hitler was raised as a spoiled child by a doting
mother. Consistently failing to pass even the most
elementary studies, he grew up a half-educated young
man, untrained for any trade or profession, seemingly
doomed to failure. Brilliant, charming, cosmopolitan
Vienna he learned to loathe for what he called its
Semitism; more to his liking was homogeneous Munich, his
real home after 1912. To this man of no trade and few
interests the Great War was a welcome event which gave
him some purpose in life. Hitler took part in 48
engagements, won the German Iron Cross (first class),
was wounded once and gassed once, was in a hospital when
the Armistice of November 11, 1918 was declared.

His political career began in 1919 when he became
Member No. 7 of the midget German Labor Party.
Discovering his powers of oratory, Hitler soon became
the party's leader, changed its name to the National
Socialist German Labor Party, wrote is anti- Semitic,
anti-democratic, authoritarian program. The party's first
mass meeting took place in Munich in February 1920. The
leader intended to participate in a monarchist attempt
to seize power a month later; but for this abortive
Putsch Fuhrer Hitler arrived too late. An even less
successful National Socialist attempt -- the famed
Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 -- provided the party
with dead martyrs, landed Herr Hitler in jail. His
incarceration at Landsberg Fortress gave him time to
write the first volume of Mein Kampf, now a "must"
on every German bookshelf. (Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf
Hess helped write it. Imprisonment also gave Hitler
time to perfect his tactics. Even before that time he
got from his Communist opponents the idea of
gangster-like party storm troopers; after this the
principle of the small cell groups of devoted party
workers.)

Outlawed in many German districts, the National
Socialist Party nevertheless climbed steadily in
membership. Time-honored Tammany Hall methods of handing
out many small favors were combined with rowdy terrorism
and lurid, patriotic propaganda. The picture of a
mystic, abstemious, charismatic Fuhrer was assiduously
cultivated.

Not until 1929 did National Socialism win its first
absolute majority in a city election (at Coburg) and
make its first significant showing in a provincial
election (in Thuringia). But from 1928 on the party
almost continually gained in electoral strength. In the
Reichstag elections of 1928 it polled 809,000 votes. Two
years later 6,401,016 Germans voted for National
Socialist deputies while in 1932 the vote was
13,732,779. While still short of a majority, the vote was
nevertheless impressive proof of the power of the man
and his movement.

The situation which gave rise to this demagogic,
ignorant, desperate movement was inherent in the German
Republic's birth and in the craving of large sections of
the politically immature German people for strong,
masterful leadership. Democracy in Germany was conceived
in the womb of military defeat. It was the Republic
which put its signature (unwillingly) to the humiliating
Versailles Treaty, a brand of shame which it never lived
down in German minds.

That the German people love uniforms, parades,
military formations, and submit easily to authority is no
secret. Fuhrer Hitler's own hero is Frederick the
Great. That admiration stems undoubtedly from
Frederick's military prowess and autocratic rule rather
than from Frederick's love of French culture and his
hatred of Prussian boorishness. But unlike the polished
Frederick, Fuhrer Hitler, whose reading has always been
very limited, invites few great minds to visit him, nor
would Fuhrer Hitler agree with Frederick's contention
that he was "tired of ruling over slaves."
(Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, also complained
of the submissiveness of German character.)

In bad straits even in fair weather, the German
Republic collapsed under the weight of the 1929-34
depression in which German unemployment soared to
7,000,000 above a nationwide wind drift of bankruptcies
and failures. Called to power as Chancellor of the Third
Reich on January 30, 1933 by aged, senile President
Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Hitler began to
turn the Reich inside out. Unemployment was solved by:
1) a far-reaching program of public works; 2) an intense
re-armament program, including a huge standing army; 3)
enforced labor in the service of the State (the German
Labor Corps); 4) putting political enemies and Jewish,
Communist and Socialist jobholders in concentration
camps.

What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to Germany in less
than six years was applauded wildly and ecstatically by
most Germans. He lifted the nation from post-War
defeatism. Under the swastika Germany was unified. His
was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great
energy and magnificent planning. The "socialist" part of
National Socialism might be scoffed at by hard-&-
fast Marxists, but the Nazi movement nevertheless had a
mass basis. The 1,500 miles of magnificent highways
built, schemes for cheap cars and simple workers'
benefits, grandiose plans for rebuilding German cities
made Germans burst with pride. Germans might eat many
substitute foods or wear ersatz clothes but they did
eat.

What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to the German people
in that time left civilized men and women aghast. Civil
rights and liberties have disappeared. Opposition to the
Nazi regime has become tantamount to suicide or worse.
Free speech and free assembly are anachronisms. The
reputations of the once-vaunted German centres of
learning have vanished. Education has been reduced to a
National Socialist catechism.

Pace Quickened. Germany's 700,000 Jews have been
tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties,
denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets.
Now they are being held for "ransom," a gangster trick
through the ages. But not only Jews have suffered. Out
of Germany has come a steady, ever- swelling stream of
refugees, Jews and Gentiles, liberals and conservatives,
Catholics as well as Protestants, who could stand
Naziism no longer. TIME's cover, showing Organist Adolf
Hitler playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated
cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine's
wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on, was drawn by
Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a Catholic who found
Germany intolerable.

Meanwhile, Germany has become a nation of uniforms,
goose- stepping to Hitler's tune, where boys of ten are
taught to throw hand grenades, where women are regarded
as breeding machines. Most cruel joke of all, however,
has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German
capitalists and small businessmen who once backed
National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's
bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi
credo that the individual belongs to the state also
applies to business. Some businesses have been
confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital
tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly
controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental
control and interference in business could be deduced
from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all
industrial orders in Germany originated last year with
the Government. Hard-pressed for food-stuffs as well as
funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and
in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure
fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.

When Germany took over Austria she took upon herself
the care and feeding of 7,000,000 poor relations. When
3,500,000 Sudetens were absorbed, there were that many
more mouths to feed. As 1938 drew to a close many were
the signs that the Nazi economy of exchange control,
barter trade, lowered standard of living,
"self-sufficiency," was cracking. Nor were signs lacking
that many Germans disliked the cruelties of their
Government, but were afraid to protest them. Having a
hard time to provide enough bread to go round, Fuhrer
Hitler was being driven to give the German people
another diverting circus. The Nazi controlled press,
jumping the rope at the count of Propaganda Minister
Paul Joseph Goebbels, shrieked insults at real
and imagined enemies. And the pace of the German
dictatorship quickened as more & more guns rolled
from factories and little more butter was produced.

In five years under the Man of 1938, regimented
Germany had made itself one of the great military powers
of the world today. The British Navy remains supreme on
the seas. Most military men regard the French Army as
incomparable. Biggest question mark is air strength,
which changes from day to day, but most observers
believe Germany superior in warplanes. Despite a
shortage of trained officers and a lack of materials,
the German Army has become a formidable machine which
could probably be beaten only by a combination of
opposing armies. As testimony to his nation's puissance,
Fuhrer Hitler could look back over the year and remember
that besides receiving countless large-bore statesmen
(Mr. Chamberlain three times, for instance), he paid his
personal respects to three kings (Sweden's Gustaf,
Denmark's Christian, Italy's Vittorio Emanuele) and was
visited by two (Bulgaria's Boris, Rumania's Carol--not
counting Hungary's Regent, Horthy).

Meanwhile an estimated 1,133 streets and squares,
notably Rathaus Platz in Vienna, acquired the name of
Adolf Hitler. He delivered 96 public speeches, attended
eleven opera performances (way below par), vanquished
two rivals (Benes and Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austria's
last Chancellor), sold 900,000 new copies of Mein
Kampf in Germany besides selling it widely in Italy
and Insurgent Spain. His only loss was in eyesight: he
had to begin wearing spectacles for work. Last week Herr
Hitler entertained at a Christmas party 7,000 workmen
now building Berlin's new mammoth Chancellery, told
them: "The next decade will show those countries with
their patent democracy where true culture is to be
found."

But other nations have emphatically joined the
armaments race and among military men the poser is:
"Will Hitler fight when it becomes definitely certain
that he is losing that race?" The dynamics of
dictatorship are such that few who have studied Fascism
and its leaders can envision sexless, restless,
instinctive Adolf Hitler rounding out a mellow middle
age in his mountain chalet at Berchtesgaden while a
satisfied German people drink beer and sing folk songs.
There is no guarantee that the have-not nations will go
to sleep when they have taken what they now want from
the haves. To those who watched the closing events of
the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of
1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.